[I liked the #newinwheezy effort for the last Debian release, so I tipped Mika off about it again this time]
A short post about what is #newinjessie, Debian’s new 8.0 Jessie release. See Mika’s debian-devel post for more information.
For this release cycle, I have uploaded two new packages:
dtv-scan-tables - Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) initial scan files This is a new package which splits out the DVB initial scan files from linux-dvb-apps (see below).
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Since moving house last year, I’ve found myself unable to receive Saorview (Irish DVB-T) using an indoor aerial (my new house is about 10km further from the transmitter). This was previously my primary way of receiving the RTÉ Radio stations when working on my desktop. I have a high gain wideband antenna in the attic which works great, but with no neat way to get a cable to my desktop, this is unfortunately not an option.
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If you follow upstream Git development closely, you may have noticed that the Mercurial and Bazaar remote helpers (use git to interact with hg and bzr repos) no longer live in the main Git tree. They have been split out into their own repositories, here and here.
git-remote-bzr had been packaged (as git-bzr) for Debian since March 2013, but was removed in May 2014 when the remote helpers were removed upstream.
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HP recently announced that they are no longer offering free firmware updates for their ProLiant line of servers.
I have a HP ProLiant G7 N36L MicroServer at home (running Debian stable, naturally) which I got back in early 2011. While it has, and continues, to serve me well, I’ll have to reconsider my options when I go looking for a replacement. This is a pity because I really like the MicroServer form factor.
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I’ve tried most of the DVB streaming solutions for Linux, including VDR, MuMuDVB, DVBBlast, dvbstream, DVBStreamer, GNOME DVB Daemon. I’ve only managed to find one that does this well though, which is DVBStreamer.
Getting started with DVBStreamer is pretty easy. First of all you need a DVB adapter that works with Linux. I use a USB ITE IT913x-based adapter, which works well for me.
Once you have a compatible package, you need to install necessary (Debian/Ubuntu) packages:
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Just a quick post to say thanks to Valve Corporation for generously offering free Valve game subscriptions to Debian Developers.
Also thanks to Neil, Jo and everyone else at Collabora for making this happen. Much appreciated.
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After serving me well for the past four and a half years, I’ve finally upgraded my desktop computer. The main driver for this upgrade was that I needed more than 4GB RAM for testing my VMs. Given that DDR4 is due soon, I really wasn’t willing to spend money to upgrade my already obsolete DDR2 RAM.
I have no interest in overclocking, so I went with a Intel Core i7-4770 CPU, Gigabyte H87-D3H motherboard, and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM.
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The Debian Ireland User Group will be meeting for festive drinks this Thursday, 19th Dec 2013, at 20:00 in The Long Stone, Townsend Street, Dublin 2. All welcome.
For more information, please see the mailing list or contact us via IRC.
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Having used GNU/Linux systems for some time now, and having submitted patches to a fair number of open source projects, it is nice to finally get a patch accepted into the biggest open source project of them all, the Linux kernel. While I did submit a kernel patch to OpenWrt back in 2011, it is maintained as a rebased patchset, and was never upstreamed to Linus’ tree.
That changed today though, when a small patch I (had forgotten I had) sent to the linux-media mailinglist back in October 2013, was just pulled by Linus Torvalds into his tree for the Linux 3.
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I found out yesterday that GNOME (or more correctly, the GNOME window manager, Metacity) only allows you to switch to a specific workspace. You cannot cycle through workspaces, wrapping around to the first when on the last. There is a long-standing upstream bug report, about this issue, but sadly it is marked as wontfix.
I have, however, found a workaround using wmctrl. These commands could obviously be much nicer if they were placed in a proper script, but I wanted a one line snippet that I could add to my xbindkeys config.
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